I believe I faced up a typical problem for the owners of digital cameras. All of the pictures I've made have been stored in a tiff format. This format does not lose the quality of the image, but it is paid by the size of the files which, in my case, reaches 30-40MB. The JPEG format instead, uses a compression that looses the quality but in return produces essentially smaller files that can be easily exchanged in the Internet. Therefore most photographers store their pictures in tiff (or even larger formats) but each time there is a need to send them over the Internet they compress them to JPEGs or GIFs  etc … Having many hundreds of pictures, I spent over one hour searching for any software that would automate compression and save my time. There is a plenty of software doing that (and much more), however those I found were limited by trial licences (either in the number of files they could process or they added strange logos to the files they produces). Obviously full versions need to be paid.  Nowadays, with all open-source technologies, I find unacceptable asking money for such a trivial function like compression from one graphic format to another. Therefore I quickly wrote a primitive programme doing that and hereafter I distribute it to anybody who is interested for FREE. The file in zip can be found here:

Java version 1.4 or above is required, the software is no more that 50 lines of code and uses java imageIO and JAI libraries as well as com.draw libraries for metadata extraction. The user interface is as primitive as the software itself and uses command line (to make it easy to automate):
convert.bat <destination folder> [-d] <tiff files>
<destination folder> - the folder where JPEGs will be stored after compression
[-d] - optional switch, if used the name of the JPEGs will be preceded by the date when the photo was taken
<tiff files> - tiff file[s] (for example ./*.tiff)